The calendar of doom

**warning, this post contains a lot of self-pity, aggravation and general moodiness. please do not respond with rainbows and puppy dogs, I will kick your ass. I’m serious**

You see that calendar? It’s on the fridge. Every week when I come home from chemo, we scratch out the 2/3 lines for that day. We were getting to the bottom of the page. So you know what happened today?

They gave me a new page. It’s not chemo, it’s the ongoing herceptin that I will get every 3 weeks for a full year. But the thing that is pissing me off today are the dates that are NOT on the calendar. There is no radiation on there. Because they can’t schedule it yet. FIRST I have to actually finish chemo. THEN I need a full-body scan to make a 3D model of me and my tumor-bed. THEN they will try to squeeze me into the schedule along with the other 200 people they have no room for. At some point, I will start daily, 30-45 treatments of radiation. The start date and the number are both undetermined at this time.

I don’t do will with undertermined. I need a start date. I need to book a vacation, even if it’s just 3 days in NYC or a quick jaunt to Florida. I need to get out of here. I need to not be a cancer patient for a couple of days.

Most of all, I need my frigging White Blood Cells to cooperate and go back up. Because today for the first time, I was so borderline, they actually had a 3-person discussion about whether or not I could have chemo. Those 3 people did not include me. They just had the discussion in front of me. Luckily, the agreed to go ahead, because a 1-week delay would have done me in, mentally.

I had this great idea the other day. They needed a volunteer for 30 min in the morning at the public school, to help process the kids that come in late. Their parent’s committee is almost non-existent and the lady was SO EXCITED that I could do it. You should have see the look on the oncologist’s face when I told him what I was planning on doing ‘to keep busy’….. turns out low WBC and the reception office of a public school are probably not a good match… duh. I didn’t even think of that. I was so excited to find *something* to do.

So for now me and my bitterness and anger are going to hang out in the coldest room in the house to hide from the hot flashes. With knitting and whatever new show I can discover – I’m now watching Australian TV shows because I have run out of US and UK options. Soon, I’ll move on to German or Russian shows. Might as well dust off the old language skills